Finding communities to join can be hard because each fediverse server only knows about a community after someone has joined it before. It’s a chicken and egg problem. To solve this, PieFed comes with eggs included!

Techy details: a local copy of https://data.lemmyverse.net/data/community.full.json is regularly updated, inactive and nsfw communities removed and then the resulting shortlist is used to suggest search results to people when adding a remote community.

Check out the video for a quick demo.

Massive props to @[email protected] for their work on this feature!

  • bdonvrA
    13·
    3 days ago

    FYI for any fellow lemmy admins here - you can enroll your instance into lemmy-federate.com with a bot account that you make which will do much the same. It will subscribe to new and unknown (to your instance) communities and share your communities to everyone else’s instances!

    Edit: apparently this also supports PieFed too!

    • freamon@preferred.socialEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      It’s subtly different though. This is essentially providing an auto-complete to community searching, whether your instance already has a copy of the community or not. It would work even for a brand-new instance that hadn’t subscribed to anything yet.

      What that bot is doing isn’t necessarily a good thing (if no real person is subscribed to something, then all the traffic is just pollution). 3rd party hacks can’t compete with actually-integrated features.

      • bdonvrA
        8·
        3 days ago

        It provides a better user experience by far though.

        When you’re the first on your instance to subscribe to a foreign lemmy community, your instance only gets 10 posts and no comments or vote info. So you get a nearly useless empty sub that will start filling in from that point as people post new things. Especially frustrating if you were looking for or were linked to a specific thread.

        With this solution your content was already there, waiting for you. And also searches on your instance will return posts and comments from that community greatly increasing discoverability.